Blog

If you’ve always been interested in starring in a film or in the process of making one, this is your opportunity. The MMBF (Matthew Martino Benevolent Fund) is a UK based charity supporting filmmakers, actors and young people with an interest in arts through training grants and bursaries.

You’ve been talking about it, your friends have been talking about it, your friends’ friends have been talking about it, hell I even heard the milkman talking about it the other day, and now the date is finally here. That’s right, it’s time for you to start preparing for the VFX Festival 2015.

The lovely folks over at Imagineer Systems have donated licenses for mocha Pro 4 to Escape Studios and just in time for their annual Mocha Halloween Video Contest! Imagineer Systems is the Academy Award-winning developer of mocha: Planar Tracking based visual effects solutions for film and video post production.

First of all, I’d like to introduce myself; I’m Lola, and you can find me at Front of House at Escape Studios. I’ve recently joined the team and have been lucky enough to meet some of our lovely students and Escapees; feel free to pop by reception and say hi!

This time of year tends to be a busy time for VFX, particularly for Compositing departments, with film production schedules nearing the end of their pipeline, and VFX teams working towards looming delivery deadlines. During this busy time, it’s great to see our graduates benefitting from the industry’s demand for more experienced Compositors. This is certainly the case for Jacopo Landi who graduated from our Advanced Compositing for VFX course last March and is now working at Double Negative as a Digital Stereo Compositor.

Here at Escape Studios, we have subscriptions to the most cutting edge Industry publications delivered to our studios each month, and we fist punched the air recently when we saw both an Escape Tutor, AND one of our advisory board members featuring in 3D Artist Magazine and 3D World Magazine respectively.

Sci-Fi-London (The London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film) kicks off today, boasting a fantastic line up of titles – some new and some offering more of a nostalgic trip down memory lane. We’re particularly excited about the short film programme, Shorts Programme 2, to be screened on the closing day, Sunday 4 May, at BFI Southbank.

This year’s CG Student Awards competition has just launched and they are now taking entries. As big supporters of this competition we’re delighted to see it back for another year, and it’s looking bigger and better than ever. Dedicated to students studying for careers in Next-Gen Games and VFX / Animation industries, this competition is a great opportunity for students and alumni to showcase their work to industry experts, offering a little helping hand up the VFX career ladder.

Gravity has been celebrated across the film industry for it's outstanding achievements in VFX – a real testament to the skills of the production teams here in the UK. London based VFX studio Framestore managed the creation of the ground-breaking visuals, and 3D conversion company Prime Focus World created the 3D effects. We'd like to send everyone on the Gravity production team our congratulations on the success of their work.

For some of you with your ear to the ground, this won’t be news. It’s been rumoured for some time now that Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) were considering an expansion into the UK, and now we can rejoice in knowing the rumours have been confirmed. Yes – ILM are in the process of setting up a new facility in central London and will be looking to hire UK based talent too.

The original Alien is an incredible film. Arguably the granddaddy of space horror, it took the 70's corporation paranoia into the black, littered flawed and earnest characters throughout a floating factory and gave birth - quite literally - to one of the most terrifying creatures in cinema history.

3D modelling is one of the very first skills we teach on our 3D for Visual Effects course. The backbone for all convincing 3D VFX, it requires a strong knowledge of topology, form, texture and detail. In every class we find someone with a natural flare for this craft and 8 years ago Adam Dewhirst was one such person.

If you’ve not heard of Lee Danskin – well now is the time to get introduced. When it comes to Autodesk Maya, this is a man worth knowing. Director of Technology at Escape-Technology and the man who had a hand in creating Maya 1.0 (the 3D package that revolutionised the industry), Lee has enjoyed an incredible 18-year career working on high profile projects for some of the UK’s biggest VFX studios.